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So I'm currently trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life and am torn between several things. I have always been interested in astronomy and physics since I was a kid. I'm particularly interested in theoretical physics, and really enjoy reading about grand unified theories and problems with current models. However, I also realize that these things are based in extremely complex math, and if I were a Feynman or Hawking or whoever I think I would have already found out by now.

My surface interest in the subject is great and all, but how do I know that's not all it is? Would pursuing theoretical physics realistically bring me into contact with developing new theories of everything? Or would I struggle under the weight of math too complex except for the most gifted of people, and in reality spend most of my time at a computer punching numbers or looking at spectroscopies.
I was also considering nanotechnology by way of condensed matter physics, but if I go this route I would have to abandon Astronomy which is a shame because regardless of whether I have the aptitude for discovery or not, it's still fascinating.

Anywho, I was just wondering if I could get some physicists to sort of tell me what their undergraduate/post-grad/PhD/career timeline was like, and what thought processes led you on those paths, and is there anything you regret or wish you had been told about the field prior to becoming immersed in it? Is it really so complex mathematically? Is the reality of it that I'd probably be in a lab somewhere measuring deviations in some force on the magnitude of millionths of a percent? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

First: search on "career in physics" on /r/physics - there are a ton of posts and Q&A about careers, it's a VFAQ.

There are so many different things to do, it's hard to know in advance whether you'll like the flavor of the field. If you enjoy figuring things out in physics class, and especially if you enjoy sharing your insights with your classmates, you should consider a career in physics research.

The math gets easier as you go -- math is a language, and you get more fluent.

I am a solar astrophysicist, I got my Ph.D. nearly 20 years ago. When I went to graduate school, my interests were particle physics, solid state (nonlinear optics), and plasma physics. I noticed that there are really interesting problems to solve anywhere, so it's best to "sniff out" research groups and subfields and get a sense of the culture of the subfield -- if you really stick with something as a career, you have to live with the other people who are doing it. Solar physics had a really nice community, and I dived into some rockin' problems pretty fast.

An advantage of a career in research is that you can do more or less whatever you want (and have the talent to think about), so there's little chance of growing bored (long-term). If you find something boring, strike out in a new direction.

Get as much research experience as you possibly can, and as much on-the-job experience as you possibly can. Sign up for summer undergraduate research programs and for field-specific summer schools (which will help connect you both with interesting problems and with actual researchers, to dip your feet in the water). Beg to be allowed to assist in your favorite professor's lab. Talk to your professors -- they were where you are now, once, and they very seldom bite peoples' heads off. Almost never. Despite the rumours.

I do rely on vector calculus and linear algebra frequently - but it's a different story from in undergraduate school. I speak those languages now, so it's not a big deal. One advantage of physics over other fields is that all the fundamental stuff is pretty simple -- first order theory is usually all you need, and you'd be surprised how often you reach back to first-year stuff. The trick is having the more complicated analysis in your back pocket for those rare occasions when you do need it.

Two things to watch out for, both in school and in your career:

(1) imposter syndrome (which nearly everyone gets) is that feeling that you can't possibly belong here, even though you seem to be fooling everyone that you do. If you can keep up, you belong there. Nobody else feels your own uncertainty, and you can't feel their uncertainty - so you think everyone else is more confident than you. It's a big deal, especially since those of us who do go into physics often get used to being "that smart kid" in class. At some point you will finally find yourself in the middle of a roomful of people, all of whom were once "that smart kid", and you'll find you have to fit in with peers. It feels weird, and can make you think you don't belong. Be ready for that.

(2) The eternal banality of quotidian life. If you set out to scale the purple mountains in the distance, that is a heroic quest and romantic and interesting. But as you're actually climbing them, you're thinking about things like where you can fill your canteen next, or how to get up or around that cliff looming just ahead, or even just placing your next footstep and forcing your legs to work. You have to take time out to experience the "big picture". That hit me during my first post-doctoral job: working at NASA/GSFC and controlling an instrument on SOHO, with a bunch of free time to engage in undirected research. It was a f*ckin' awesome, amazing place and time and opportunity, and I took good advantage of it -- but on a daily basis it was easy to start grousing about this person or that person being hard to work with, or the coffee tasting bad, or whatever. Sometimes I had to get away for a weekend to get the "big picture" back and realize how terrific it was. This experience may be reflective of what you've heard about living in a lab: even if you're doing amazing things that really pump your nads, you still have to do all the quotidian things that people do to accomplish basic tasks. (Most recently, I had that small-picture-jumps-to-big-picture experience when I was wrangling with a mechanical engineer about a poorly specified mechanical enclosure we were designing, and we got rudely interrupted by someone from the lab next door, who poked his head in and shouted "We're seeing muons! The scintillator's working!". That was pretty cool, but it also let me take a step back and notice (again) that our enclosure is supposed to fly in a two-seater rocketplane, into outer space fercryinoutloud. This life rocks.)

The biggest question to ask yourself about whether to go into physics is whether you're a big enough geek. By that, I mean that - regardless of how smart you are - you have to be, well, bent in a certain way to enjoy research. The pay is great compared to fast food, but not great compared to, say, investment banking or engineering. You'll work really long hours. You'll have trouble separating private and work life, since you'll find yourself niggling at problems in the shower or late at night. To survive in the research world, you pretty much have to be what other people call a "workaholic" - except that what drives you isn't necessarily stress, it's desire to find out what you will find. For example, my saintly then-girlfriend (now wife of 10 years) had to get used to me sometimes getting up in the middle of the night to hack on this or that problem - coding, or analysis, or whatever; and sometimes just ... wandering off mentally into whatever problem was interesting me on that day. If you do carry on and get your Ph.D., which is generally a big schwack of really difficult work, the reward is that you get to keep doing that kind of work for the rest of your career if you want to. If fooling around with physics problems, bizarre equipment, and mind-bending ideas (usually with really boneheaded implementation) is your idea of fun, and you'd do it for free if you didn't have to eat somehow, then welcome aboard.

If you do want to stay in physics, do yourself a favor and take a course in journalism now - and maybe another in creative writing. As a class, physicists suck at writing, which is really too bad since communication is a big part of what we do. Also - read the first year or so of Ph.D. comics, which captures (comically) the flavor of working in a physics lab.

So it seems to me that astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, etc. seems to be lacking in the financial department. The discovery or explanation of observations occurring on the order of light years away doesn't have much affect on day to day human life, and subsequently doesn't really have the ability to generate that much money. Seeing as how money is a big concern when factoring in lifetime goals such as a family, perhaps a more realistic area to pursue would be something in the way of condensed matter physics. So, my question is, if you make a discovery, say, hypothetically, of a new ultra-efficient catalyst that can be used for industrial scale synthesis of some chemical or whatnot, do you get royalties for that? or just your name in a textbook? if you don't discover anything new are you going to be living off of grant money?

All research is starved all the time, if you're still in undergraduate you should be thinking more in terms of what fields interest you. Condensed matter is great - the physics there is nicely challenging, and somewhat applied (as you say). But that doesn't mean it's any easier, necessarily, to get funding to do your work. Patent royalties depend on employer - universities and most research labs will claim all rights, though that varies from place to place and you can sometimes negotiate. A metric boatload of ideas from Stanford University have been exploited and used to make graduates rich -- and the University often turns a blind eye, provided that the benefactors in turn support the University. Cisco, Yahoo, and Google are three examples of companies founded at Stanford in violation of the letter of their intellectual property policy.

By "Starved" I mean that a healthy granting program for research offers a 1:3 funding ratio for grants - so 2/3 of applicants get turned away at the best of times. Heliophysics has been getting the squeeze lately at 1:8 or higher. But funding is always a problem - has been since the days of royal sponsorship. When I graduated in the 1990s there was an article in Physics Today comparing recent physics Ph.D. graduates to industrial pollution -- an unwanted byproduct of doing research at universities. Ouch. But somehow the field keeps lurching along and it is possible to make a living at it.

People complain about lack of stability in the research field - but if there's one thing the last 20 years should have taught everyone, it's that corporate jobs aren't stable either. You may be 1-3 years away from poverty at any time in a "soft money" research job, but you're two weeks away from your potentially last paycheck at any salaried job, and the employee-loyal zaibatsu's of the 1950s are long, long gone.

So it looks like IP rights are dependent on your employer and whatever contract you have signed prior to starting your research. You said it isn't necessarily easier to get funding for Condensed Matter physics, but perhaps I didn't explain well enough. My line of thought was that since condensed matter physics in the form of nanotechnology is such an important burgeoning field, in that it has applications to almost every aspect of modern life, funding for it would be much easier to find, especially from the private sector. Whereas astrophysics mainly has intellectual implications, nanotechnology has industrial applications.

Yea and I have a number of negative predispositions towards corporate-driven research. However, that being said, I think it also offers some very nice opportunities for astronomy/cosmology related work by way of creating more precise and/or efficient instruments. I know a big part of dark matter research relies on the exquisite sensitivity of their instruments, as does most physical research.

Yea i've been to Khan Academy a few times back when I was going through Calc II. The thing is i'm not bad at math and I don't feel like I have some disability regarding it, sorry if that's what was implied, what I was trying to get at is that to be on the forefront of grand unified theories such as M-theory and the like, you have to be able to do math at such a level that the people doing it are reminiscent of Good Will Hunting. Maybe i'm wrong in this regard, which would be great, but so far this is what I have been led to believe when talking about the breakthrough work being done in theoretical physics.

You should hear what mathematicians have to say about that movie. Let's just say that it isn't very realistic.

Read the second to last link in my last comment. All that matters is hard work. The reason people at high levels seem so far removed from the rest of us is that you can't imagine the amount of work they took to get there, nor the mental tricks they've used to more effectively learn the material (which the last link would hopefully help you with).

You either want it enough to do the work or you don't. But that's up to you and no one else.

The math is actually very difficult. If you want to have any chance of doing theory this level of math has to be very easy for you. Even the smartest people I know struggled with that math and consequently realized that theory wasn't going to work out for them. It almost goes without saying that if you struggle with something like calculus, you have have a slim chance of making it. Yes you can get further if you work hard but you have to be realistic.

Not on its own. You have to wrestle it to the ground yourself. Sometimes there is a specific moment when you realize you don't have to deal with it any more. Sometimes it'll come when your work is recognized and respected by a third party. But it helps a lot to remember and recognize the syndrome: "Ah, there's my old friend again..." Sort of like learning about the complex->quaternion->octonion progression. Octonions are, to be blunt, effing weird -- but after a while they're just weird old friends.

Physics is a hard life. I have a phd in physics and seen firsthand how tough it is. You will be sacrificing a lot to make a career out of it. The only exceptions are those who are absolutely brilliant but even they had to work fairly hard. You will sacrifice a lot of income which means you will have to worry about money, postpone buying a house and staring a family and so on. You may do more interesting work but in the end it will feel like just another job. I can't stress this enough. It matters little how interested you are in this stuff. You will be stressing about funding, deadlines, management bullshit, etc. I'd advise that you strongly consider the benefits of being able to make enough money so that you never have to worry about it. That means making compromises like perhaps majoring in something that is technical but still pays very well like electrical engineering.
I've heard more than one astrophysics tell me that the worst thing you can do if you are interested in astro stuff is to make a career out of it. Just let it be a hobby you can do for fun. Again, there are exceptions but they tend to be the smartest people I know.
I'd you've ever had problems with math up until this point, that is an indication that will probably have a rough time making it as a researcher
Good luck.

I agree with what you are saying (although it's far more negatively pitched than my answer, we seem to be saying about the same substantive things) -- except for the business about "[If] you've ever had problems with math up until this point, that is an indication that [you] will probably have a rough time making it as a researcher."

Everyone has problems with math, sooner or later. Everyone. Hell, I was studying calculus at 13 and linear algebra at 14, and even I had problems with some of my math classes in college and graduate school. Many of my peers struggled with (and beat) problems learning vector calculus or group theory or whatever. The concern isn't whether you've had challenges, the concern is whether you have the desire and bloody-mindedness to beat them.

I am speaking in general. The people I know who are better at math and solving problems in general are more successful which shouldn't surprise anyone. In experimental physics, you can get by not being as bright be cause other things like management and selling skills can matter a lot. This is not the case in theory. In theory, you have to be freaking smart and very creative to make it. The grad school I attend attracted the brightest theory hopefuls. They wanted to do string theory but most eventually move to easier things. Keep in mind that these were all people who most would consider insanely smart and hard working. Many we're consider the brightest of the undergraduate departments. None of these guys struggled at all with undergraduate level math.

I was also considering nanotechnology by way of condensed matter physics, but if I go this route I would have to abandon Astronomy which is a shame because regardless of whether I have the aptitude for discovery or not, it's still fascinating.

I know a guy who's working on creating photo detectors for telescopes out of superconducting films. They would be intensity sensitive, which is cool since CCDs just see 'yes' or 'no'. Cross-specialization research is the shit.

Everyone thinks they want to do theory when they start out. It sounds romantic, it's the closest thing to what you've been doing in class (lots of math, derivations, etc) and the theoreticians are often the people you hear about in your low level classes. But it's really goddamn hard to make a big contribution in theoretical physics, especially in things like unification. On the other hand, it's much easier to make a big contribution in experiment, and you aren't doing physics any less that way. It's also fun (though aggravating) to work with apparatus.

A few suggestions. First, pick something more 'traditional' as a second choice career. Some kind of engineering works well, but pick something you enjoy. This is your backup, in case you get disenamoured with physics. Fill up your free schedule slots with classes from that field. Next, expose yourself to as many different subfields as you can. Try to work in groups which do as many different things as you can. Don't worry about theory as an undergrad. It's very hard to make an impact until you've had a graduate background, and you can switch to that later on if that's really what you want to do.

As far as timeline: four years of undergrad, then between five and seven years of grad school (±1 year). After that, it depends what you want to do. If you want to stay in pure research (national lab or observatory or whatnot) or become a professor, you're looking at one or more postdoctoral positions of one to two years each. If you want to go into industry, you can either do an industrial postdoc or go straight there.

After finishing my PhD, I've decided I want to go into industry. Given that conclusion, it probably wasn't the most efficient use of my time to do physics. I still don't regret it. I've had loads of fun along the way. We'll all be dead in a hundred years, so you might as well do what makes you happy along the way.

This is perfect. Definitely hit the nail on the head. That last part especially holds a lot of import in my thought processes regarding these things, because, for me at least, I don't see much point in spending my lifetime theorizing the existence of something when it may or may not even be proven until many years after I've died, at which point it doesn't matter at all because I'm dead. I think the idea of theory has definitely been romanticized in my head, and while it's nice picturing yourself writing an equation on a blackboard in some dingy basement somewhere and then saying "Aha! I've solved the theory of everything!", it's not very realistic, even given an entire lifetime's devotion to the subject.

First, I endorse drzowie's response as excellent. To address directly a couple of your points:

However, I also realize that these things are based in extremely complex math, and if I were a Feynman or Hawking or whoever I think I would have already found out by now.

Very few of us are Feynmen or Hawkings, but most of us don't need to be. Intelligence is certainly required, but you don't have to be off the charts to do most of physics. That said, the level of mathematical ability needed varies from field to field. You'll have to master vector calculus and similar in college to get through the basics. That's enough for much of experimental physics, but theorists usually use much (sometimes muchmuchmuchmuch) more.

My surface interest in the subject is great and all, but how do I know that's not all it is?

This is a biggie, and it's good that you're asking yourself now. I'm struggling with this myself, wondering at what level my true interest lies. Part of it is probably exhaustion from finishing my PhD last year, and some of the imposter syndrome discussed above. I'm not sure how to find the limit of your interest until you hit it.

Would pursuing theoretical physics realistically bring me into contact with developing new theories of everything?

Direct contact is very unlikely. I'm not a theorist myself, but I had several friends in grad school who dwarfed my mathematical talents aim for the stars and take their shots at contributing to string theory only to fall thunderously back to earth and settle for less fundamental work. This is where the Feynmen and Hawkings and better are needed.

If you go down this path saying "theory of everything or bust", you're setting yourself up for a possible massive disappointment 8-12 years from now. But if you can cultivate several interests on a range of topics and be okay with pursuing one in case you hit the wall and can't climb it, then you can still end up happy. It's good that you listed several topics of interset here.

and in reality spend most of my time at a computer punching numbers or looking at spectroscopies.

Honestly it's hard to avoid that or similar whether you're a hot shot or not. Doing new science is long, tedious work. If it were easy someone would have done it already. To paraphrase Edison, science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. However, it is likely true of just about everything in life, science or not.

Anywho, I was just wondering if I could get some physicists to sort of tell me what their undergraduate/post-grad/PhD/career timeline was like, and what thought processes led you on those paths

Out of high school "Physics sounds neat, I'll try it in college"

End of 4 years in college: "I'm not sure I really want to do this, but I don't know what else to do and I got into top grad schools. I'll try experimental high energy physics or theoretical cosmology because I enjoyed learning about them"

6 months into grad school: "Holy shit I just can't cut it as a theorist. Sign me up for some of that LHC goodness"

After first summer of LHC research: "My mind is already rotting from the impending tedium, eject! Find a smaller high-energy project"

2 weeks later: Funding for that project cut, despair for 6 months

Take a neat nuclear astrophysics course, sign up with professor to do my thesis research on the fancy new apparatus he's building. Says I should be done in my 4th or 5th year in grad school.

4th year: apparatus not working yet. Should be up in 2 weeks.

5th year: apparatus not working yet. Should be up in 2 weeks.

6th year: apparatus not working yet. Should be up in 2 weeks.

7th year: apparatus kinda working a little. Squeeze some data out that isn't very consequential and exhaust myself to finish my thesis before 8th year starts, on principle.

I'm a doctor now and I hate my field. Time to start life over again and find a job.

is there anything you regret or wish you had been told about the field prior to becoming immersed in it?

Be sure to have your motivations clear at all times. You don't need the whole picture from the start, but make sure at least that taking the next step is what you really want to do, with contingency plans. I've heard grad school described as "hitting the snooze button on life" for some people, and I think that's accurate in many cases.

Also, the fields that sound the coolest when you learn about them are the ones that are already mature and stagnant. Nuclear astrophysics is awesome... except that it hasn't made any major progress in 50 years.

Is the reality of it that I'd probably be in a lab somewhere measuring deviations in some force on the magnitude of millionths of a percent?

Only if that's what you want. Nobody forces you to do anything, and if you push to do something new in grad school, you will. That said, at some point you're going to need a real job, and jobs are where the funding is. This means it takes a longer view to end up getting a job in a field you find interesting.

Keep in mind that if you find a deviation at a millionth of a percent that wasn't predicted, you could have just overthrown the known laws of physics and begun a scientific revolution that will be spoken of for ten thousand years. That usually doesn't happen though.

Thanks for answering piecewise. That timeline in particular was really helpful. I think after discussing with my professors, listening to all the advice on here from people that have done this thing, and researching the career a bit more, that it really isn't what I originally had in my mind, and ultimately isn't something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life.
Edit; that being said, I am still interested in physics, but I want something applicable with realtime results and progress I can see. I'm not going to go into theoretics but I could still very much see myself doing something along the lines of condensed matter or maybe more towards the chemistry side of working on catalysts.